A New England Affair

by Steven Carroll

  And as the word claps in his ears, Tom swings round as if awoken. And his voice, harsh and, it seems now, pitiless, the voice of one who sees her tears but not her pain, is, likewise, unlike any voice she ever heard come out of him. ‘I would have given you everything! Everything! I would have married you in an instant. Given myself unreservedly. Walked throughout the years with you, wherever they took us. I too had that kind of certainty. And I too waited. A young fool with more feeling than sense!’ His voice rises and soon he is shouting, a lifetime’s messy emotions rising from the depths they have long been consigned to, the distant pain as strong as yesterday. ‘Once! I loved you once. You know so well I did. Love like faith. Pure and simple. And I came to you with that love. To give it to you. To place it in your care. And all I required was a word. A confirmation that I was not dreaming. That I was not ridiculous. That I was not a fool. But you turned away. Or you turned me away. You saw it all and still you turned away!’ He stands, glowering at her. Oh, what have they become? Is he really yelling, is she really shouting? How has this come about? This can’t be them. Not Tom and Emily. Can they just begin again? Start this all over? But no, they can’t. Of course not. Like some long, rumbling dispute that erupts into inevitable war, it must now be seen through. ‘Here, I said,’ and he thumps his chest as he speaks, ‘this is for you. And I will happily go with you all my days. Where was your heart?’

  Yes, he is yelling. And as Tom’s voice rises, as Tom himself has risen, so too does Emily. Both facing each other. And these two characters from the pages of Mr James or Mrs Wharton — their lines written before they ever spoke, their roles assigned, their characters moulded by the invisible author of the time and the place that made them — are now shouting and yelling and glaring across the room as if they no longer recognised each other, no longer knew who they were. Or rather, they are beginning to recognise that had they been assigned an author from another age, they might well have set free all these feelings that they had never dared let break the surface, set them free a lot sooner, and this is what they would have become. And these are the words they might have spoken.

  ‘I was not myself that day!’ she cries and pleads, both begging and demanding to be understood: see my tears, and see my pain. ‘You come to me once and once only and offer up your heart and I’m supposed to jump and say, yes Tom, yes Tom. All our days, Tom! Just like that,’ she cries, clapping her hands together. ‘But it was the wrong day. The right love, but the wrong day. And don’t you think there hasn’t been a day gone by since when I haven’t looked deep into myself, into the workings of my heart, and wished that day back to live all over again? Don’t you? Don’t you think I haven’t relived that day over and again ever since? Well?’ She stops, exhausted, swaying on her feet and steadying herself on the arm of the chair. She stays like this until she feels strong enough to go on, and when she resumes her voice is softer, the anger wrung from her. ‘But I was not myself that day. Don’t you think I know it?’ The question is addressed to herself as much as Tom. ‘And is it fair that just a handful of hours should amount to so much?’

  He shakes his head, as if to say what they both know, that the fairness or unfairness of such things is not the point. His voice too is softer, drained of any lingering indignation. ‘Had I known, had I left that day knowing that you had such feelings for me as I had for you, I would never have stayed away. Would never have married. Would always have come back, with yellow roses for Miss Hale. If I had known there were something to come back to, I would have. And there was. But I never knew then.’

  ‘And I,’ she says, almost smiling, ‘I would have waited, knowing that a year isn’t so long, after all.’ And here she does smile, with a grim resignation. ‘And now our time has come and gone, and I have waited all these years. For this.’ She slumps back into her chair.

  Tom eases back into his. ‘I know it was I who left, but I was the one who felt left. And I know we didn’t have long together, but I imagine that sometimes an hour is enough. Or a minute. All I know is that afterwards I had this constant, nagging feeling that I was lacking an arm or leg, or some vital part of me, and would have to go through life with the feeling that something that was once there was now gone, and all I would be left with would be the sensation of when it was there.’ He stares at her, she at him, long and deep: her eyes bright with music, his the darkest eyes she has ever looked into; both lingering, just as they had in the parlour games of their youth, one last time, as the ghost of old love passes between them and slowly, reluctantly, leaves the room.

  ‘That was our time,’ she murmurs. ‘Never to be repeated.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too late.’

  With no further delay, drained and exhausted, she raises her arm almost regally. ‘You are released.’

  His eyes close as he absorbs the finality of what has happened. Of what she has said. What have we done … what have we … ? He sits perfectly still, saying nothing, for some time. Then without uttering another word (for what else is there to say?), he rises from his chair and lets himself out. No goodbye, no final farewell: from either him or her. They are beyond such things.

  They pass the lighthouse, the wharf Henry and Emily started from now visible in the distance. Emily is still on the deck, more or less where Henry placed her. She is contemplating the land as Eastern Point passes by. There, just over there … They were the last words they ever exchanged. You are released. The last time they ever sat in the same room together and talked. The last time he ever spoke to her. The last time they ever met. For all the shouting and accusation, a brief meeting after such a long wait. Letters had sustained them during the war and between his or her visits to here or there afterwards. But after that morning, there were only letters. And not many. There, just over there …

  She hears the door click shut. He is gone. The room is silent. She takes her chair back to the window and studies the dirt road along which he came not so long before and waits for him to reappear. And soon he does. With his cap still in hand, he retraces his steps towards the family’s old holiday house. And it occurs to her that this is the last time she’ll ever see him. The last time their paths will ever cross. For she is not one of the family (never felt one of the family), and never will be now. And she will have no cause to ever return to this place. They will live, in all likelihood, in separate worlds.

  Perhaps he will turn, and look back just once. Does he know he is being watched? Possibly. He doesn’t turn. And the fact that he doesn’t, she takes as a pronouncement. This is final. Final, that dreaded word. His steps are even, steady. Familiar tweeds, familiar Tom, familiar for the last time. Her Tom for the last time.

  Then a young couple, the woman in summer frock, the man in summer suit, appears and the three of them pause and talk. The young couple seems to be asking where something or other is, and Tom points them in the right direction. The two young people are smiling as they chat; the talk continues, becomes an exchange — perhaps they have discovered places and people in common. And so, on they chat, the young people smiling. There is even time for a cigarette. And Tom, drawing, no doubt, on one of his French cigarettes (and she can almost smell it from where she sits), waves his smoking hand here and there in the morning sun: and was that a smile? A happy man, she thinks. A man who looks, for all the world, like someone who has just had a giant weight taken off him and is enjoying the lightness he now feels. Soon they part and wave each other farewell. Like old friends. Then he turns, head bowed once again, solemn once again, and concentrating on each step as he would on the words for a poem, he passes round a small bend in the road and disappears. The great event.

  And it is then that the upright posture, the straight upright back of Emily Hale, gives way and her head slumps forward, no longer looking out the window, for there is nothing to look at. Or for. Who was he? Who is he? This man who stands and chats and smokes in the morning light without a care: the lightness he feels, the lightness that comes of being released from the weight of his
promise, animating his every gesture and movement. A happy man, she thinks, unaware that his happiness has been noted. Who was he? Did she ever know? All the years, all the waiting; the deals that were never acknowledged as deals; the things you told yourself that you only half believed at the time and which, now, you can’t believe you told yourself at all; all the hopes that were only ever false — all have come to this. Where else? It was always coming to this, already had and would again.

  She claws at the ring on her finger. But it’s wedded to her skin and won’t budge. Wedded to her very being. She pulls on it again and again, finally dragging it over her knuckle and wrenching it free. In tears of utter misery, she throws it across the room so that it ricochets from floor to wall and back to the floor, ringing hollow, hollow and empty, like all the promises and unspoken deals. Like all the hollow years that never amounted to anything. It settles, rattling to a stop. She rubs her finger, her whole body aches for what has been wrenched from her, what sustained her all these years … She’s been used. Used all along. And all the talk of pure love was as hollow as the sound of the ring bouncing from wall to floor, like a tencent toy, a tencent love, a cheap imitation of the real thing.

  Pure love, she spits the phrase into the air. Pure? She could almost laugh. Not so pure that it couldn’t be dragged down from the heavens and put to work, not so pure it couldn’t be soiled by ambition and ordinary, everyday lust: lust that paraded itself as art. And every morning when he knelt and worshipped this God of his, murmuring words of love, purity and light, was he not also worshipping at the altar of cheap, everyday fame, and was she not the very sacrifice, the very thing he used to get it? And, having got it, he now has no further need for her.

  The ring lies somewhere in the room. Let it rest wherever it fell. Tomorrow, the day after, next week, somebody will find it and pick it up and perhaps wonder how it got there.

  The gulls call, their cries tapering into silence, then they call again, on and on, and once more that feeling of utter solitariness engulfs her.

  With the lighthouse behind her and Eastern Point all but passed, Emily finds the strength to rise from the deck. The wharf from which they started their journey, hours ago, years ago, for it has been measured in both hours and years, nears. And as it nears, she notes that the feeling of utter solitariness that engulfed her that day never really went. That it is still with her, only she has grown used to it, and she’s not sure whether to be thankful for that or not.

  Miss Hale has her shoes on. Miss Hale stands steady on the deck. The water is smoother here. Henry is guiding them into the wharf, no longer, it seems, feeling the need to look over his shoulder every minute or so to check on her. But when he does she smiles. Thank you for your concern, Henry, the smile says; Miss Hale is doing fine now.

  The town is close and becoming closer with every minute. She can even see her car now, parked in the street running along the harbour.

  Too late. Yes, indeed. It was always too late: in a Boston garden; in a medieval marketplace with the sun low across the town; sitting on the boulders at the front of the family house, concealed now behind the trees on Eastern Point. Was there ever a moment when it wasn’t too late?

  One of those vaguely annoying phrases that are everywhere now comes to mind: The moment was structured that way. One of her students had used it in her last year of teaching: one of those vaguely annoying phrases by one of the new writers she’s never read and never will. Why would she? She’s walked with the best. All the same, like those annoying little jingles that are everywhere now, the phrase comes back to her. And it will do. May even be true. Was there ever a moment when they had a chance, or was everything a series of structured moments, and not by some invisible hand or author, but by that combination of who they were, when they were and where they were? Do we ever rise above that or leave that behind, or is every single decision and every single action written into us — and all we do is enact them?

  As annoying as such phrases may be, she cannot deny that it was a similar thought that carried her through those years after Tom, and that she held on to when she fell apart. The belief that she had done everything she could, and that, in the end, it didn’t really matter anyway: the result would have been the same. Indeed, she had written to a friend, during those long years after Tom, saying that even if their relationship had been consummated as these things are in the ordinary world of ordinary human love (a blunt way of putting it that she thought about before committing it to paper), would it have worked anyway? For the more she thought about it, the more she found it difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of them together. Only in make-believe was it possible. Another life altogether that they never lived, but could have. It was a way of telling herself that no matter what he or she had done, there was only ever going to be one ending. And it was already written from the moment they met.

  As well as this, there was also that consoling feeling that they had both acted with a kind of tragic nobility. That they had been in conflict with forces greater than themselves — social, historical, geographical — and had, at least, fought nobly for a life that the world was never going to grant them.

  But all that changed one January day in 1957. How did she learn of it? She’s not sure now. Sometimes these things, learning of this or that event, are clear. Sometimes blurred, even confused, like imagining you were somewhere of historic moment when, in fact, you weren’t. That day and the weeks following are a blur. She may have fainted. Did someone tell her; did she read it in the newspaper? Probably. In a newspaper, just like everybody else. ‘Poet Marries his Secretary’. She may even have been amused for a moment. Thought of it as a distracting piece of gossip on a day of no news. Which poet? What woman? Then everything became a blur.

  T.S. Eliot, aged sixty-eight, had married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, aged thirty, at a registry office in London the previous morning. In a registry office, again. Secretly, again. Impossible! Not the same mistake twice. Not Tom, surely. Not her Tom. Her Tom would never behave beneath himself twice! But who was her Tom, after all? Did he ever exist? After more than forty years of parties, concerts, meetings, letters; after endless hours of sifting through what they had and didn’t have; had she ever really known him at all? For until that day she could always tell herself that they had fought nobly for a life that the gods were never going to grant them. And that nobody knew Tom the way she did. The only woman he ever loved. In that way they were always noble; he was always noble and hers. For she had a deep, privileged knowledge of him that belonged to her and nobody else. Other people met him, but never knew him. Other people read him, but when she read him it was as though the writer and the reader were one.

  And when she spoke of him, to her girls or to friends, it was always in the manner of one who possessed an intimate knowledge of the man that no one else did. And always with quiet confidence. So much so that everybody nodded solemnly whenever she made observations or pronouncements about him, such as, ‘No, my dear, he would never say that. Not Tom. Or do that.’ Pronouncements delivered with such authority that no one ever questioned her. Now, were they laughing? If she were to walk into a crowded room, would her friends, her associates, her girls, turn their heads briefly to wipe the smiles from their faces, before turning back to express their sympathy? Their sympathy!

  And, once again, that feeling of being used, of having been used all along, came back to her. And she’d wished she still had the ring on her finger, just for the satisfaction of once more wrenching it from her, flinging it to the floor, and hearing it ring hollow in all its tencent glory.

  Days, months, passed in a blur. And it has stayed a blur: the hospital that she ended up in; the bright corridors; the long, dark, sleepless nights. The memories of things that may or may not have happened, the way she imagined, or meant what she thought: a knowing look at a Sunday service; a smile; a passing, unguarded remark that may have been about her, or may not — such was the line between the real and the imagined. Everything was about h
er. And personal. Whether it was or it wasn’t. And everything she’d known and come to take for granted was shattered: the Miss Hale, the Emily that she thought she was, defined by her years with her ‘special friend’; the Tom she thought she knew as no other could, but whom others may well have known better. Everything was shattered. For in the end, who was she, and who had she been throughout all their years together: an actor playing out a role so completely and for so long that she forgot she was acting? And who was the Tom she had known? Was it all a shadow play? Illusions within lies within deceptions that we choose to believe? And which we do while the illusions are believable, until the lies, deception and the self-deception are unmasked and everything shatters and we fall apart. Become fragments. Broken springs, wooden limbs and glass eyes lying scattered and waiting to be reassembled. But by whom? And what new form should the retrieved remains take? Who was she, who was he, who were they? Did she ever know?

  Henry is securing the boat to the wharf. When did that happen? When did they arrive? And just as he had tried to help her onto the boat, he now helps her off. Even secures the satchel strung over her shoulder, and she lets him. What of it? But he retains that look of concern, and speaks like an adult speaking to a child, the very old or someone who’s had a bit of a shock.

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It is not so long since he dragged her precariously balanced body from the boat’s railing and placed her, shoeless, on the deck near the cabin, watching over her every available moment on the journey back.

  ‘Let me.’